Writing

Review: My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead by Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Eugenides, the editor of this collection of short stories begins by saying: “I offer this book as a cure for lovesickness and an antidote to adultery. Read these love stories not to confirm the brutal realities of love, but to experience its many variegated, compensatory pleasures.”

He takes the title from the poetry of Catullus, who writes of his mistress’s pet sparrow as a rival for her attention. When the sparrow dies and fortune seems to be going his way, he is really no better off; her grief becomes the new rival.

“There s a sparrow in every story,” Eugenides teases mysteriously. What he means is that in every one of these stories, the nature of love shifts and changes. . .